Comprising thirty-one maps at a metric scale of 1:1,250 and a descriptive catalogue, The Monuments of Historic Cairo marks the first time that the city's significant architectural heritage has been mapped in ground plan within the present-day urban context. The work surveys an area of nearly six square kilometers, stretching from the city's northern walls southward to the Mosque of Ibn Tulun and the Citadel. It documents an extraordinary variety of historically important monuments ranging from the tenth through the nineteenth century, and includes street patterns that have now disappeared but that are crucial for understanding how the city has developed over the course of more than a thousand years. The catalogue provides historical information about more than 500 key buildings situated in the historic core of Cairo (one of the first cities inscribed on the World Heritage list), and includes scholarly bibliographical references, as well as details of each building's conservation history. More than two hundred buildings are documented here for the first time. Funded by the United States Agency for International Development and financed by the Egyptian Antiquities Project of the American Research Center in Egypt, The Monuments of Historic Cairo records the city's urban fabric and its architectural treasures, enhancing our understanding of the morphology and architecture of one of the world's great historic cities.
